There was an episode of television’s Friday Night Lights when a new character plays in his first game and forces a game-changing fumble. The lead-up sequence is unabashedly manipulative, as an unseen announcer criticizes Coach Taylor’s inflexible play calling and repeatedly exhorts the Panthers’ need for a big play. I remember remarking, out loud, “this is so predictable!” And yet, despite my awareness of how shamelessly Peter Berg was jerking the puppet strings of my heart, I couldn’t help but feel a swelling of excitement when Santiago burst through a blocker and leveled the quarterback with a blindside hit, sending the ball tumbling into the hands of a teammate and changing the momentum in the Panthers’ favor.
No movie has ever made me feel both so wonderfully uplifted and so deeply cynical at the same time as Forrest Gump (1994). The film itself is the feel-good story of the twentieth century, taking us on a tour of many of most significant events of the sixties and seventies, each punctuated by a digitally recreated appearance by Forrest and one of his homespun sayings. It’s pretty difficult to resist his good nature and simple charm, and there are plenty of scenes where I find my emotional response is more predictable than the salivating of Pavlov’s dogs. And it doesn’t really bother me. On the other hand, while the soundtrack to the film serves its purpose by providing appropriate period music to accompany the fantastical events of Forrest’s life and the world he inhabits, it is absolutely infuriating. I’ll explain why in a moment.
My ten-year college reunion is this weekend, and while fraternities didn’t exist at Harvey Mudd College, I did spend two years living in our campus’ closest approximation. North Dorm was a mostly male dormitory (to be fair, HMC was a mostly male college) that featured initiation rituals, fairly intense camaraderie, and relied on freshmen to perform most of the manual labor. We even had our own set of Greek symbols (Ï€
Teen angst is one of the most tempting lodes for an ore-seeking filmmaker to mine.
It was a surreal experience.
In my post about 
There’s a certain art to crafting a great movie trailer that is sort of a scale model of the art of crafting the advertised movie itself.
Sometimes, when you’re choosing the soundtrack for an adapted screenplay, the source material hands your songs right to you (such as in the novels High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, and American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis). And even though it’s about 2700 years old, Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey most likely did include its own soundtrack as a critical part of its performances in its original iterations. The Odyssey begins with the line “O Muse! Sing in me, and through me tell the story…” and consists of 12,110 lines of dactylic hexameter, which probably lent itself very well to a musical form. In the Coen Brothers’ loose adaptation O Brother Where Art Thou, however, the original rhyme and meter of the text (which of course, was in Greek) and the music, if it was actually preserved, have been discarded to accommodate the vernacular and musical traditions of Depression-era Mississippi.
The first time I ever visited Sherman Oaks and saw the childhood home of my old roommate Miles (this was back when we lived in San Diego, before he got 
